Since taking office, Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his top
aides have claimed that politics never touches state hiring.
They swore up and down that they follow the law
whenever they fill mid- to low-level civil-service positions and claimed
that they don’t even know the names of the people who were applying
for the jobs.
This was a crucial point because the governor imposed
a hiring freeze right after taking office. Because of this, all new hires
must be approved by his office. The publicly offered rationale for the
freeze was that the governor wanted to make sure that the positions were
actually needed during a budget crisis, when every penny matters.
Hiring freezes are often used as political devices to
make sure that only the “right” people are put on the payroll.
If you’ve got a guy who worked on the campaign and is qualified as a
truck driver and you’ve got an opening for a driver, you might fill
that position before you fill other openings for which you may not have any
qualified political workers.
The governor steadfastly maintained that wasn’t
how things were done in his office, however. All hires are
“blind,” meaning they look only at the job openings that they
absolutely had to fill and the qualifications of the applicants, not the
actual names.
But then the Associated Press turned up a list last
week of 1,800 hires from 2003, and 1,200 of them included the names of the
applicants.
The explanation? The Blagojevich administration
immediately fell back on an old standby: Blame the former governor, George
Ryan.
The governor’s staff claimed they were using
George Ryan’s old hiring forms, and those forms included a spot for
the names. No explanation was offered for why Blagojevich and his top
people maintained for years afterward that nobody knew the names of
applicants when, in reality, the names were clearly visible on most of the
hiring lists.
The next day, however, the AP discovered that the
Blagojevich administration’s own revised form still included the name
of the applicants. Oops.
Besides the fact that the governor was apparently not
being completely forthright when he said that names were not looked at when
many names were known (and AP’s sources also claim that names were
discussed in personnel meetings), the AP story is important because the
governor’s personnel office is under investigation by the FBI for its
hiring practices.
So if they filled nonpolitical, protected positions on
the basis of who the applicants were instead of their qualifications and
the budgetary and governmental need to fill the slots, then in the current
hostile prosecutorial environment they’ve got big trouble, campers
— big, big trouble. Why? Because if they used the names, it was most
likely because they were screening the applicants for political
connections, and you aren’t allowed to use politics when filling
civil-service jobs.
Right after Blagojevich won his election, there was
enormous pressure from legislators, county chairmen, ward and township
committeemen and everybody who ever thought of him or herself as a
“party leader” to put their people on the state payroll. The
Democrats had been locked out of the governor’s office for so many
years that the relatively small handful of political hires the governor was
allowed to make couldn’t possibly slake the tremendous thirst.
Sources have claimed all along that several rules
(particularly the state’s veterans-preference provisions) have been
bent, even outright broken, in an attempt to placate the scads of swells
who helped put the governor into office. That’s one reason
we’ve seen politically connected fortysomethings hired as interns,
then bumped up to full-time jobs without having to go through the normal
hiring procedures. That is most likely legal. But crusading U.S. Attorney
Patrick Fitzgerald has his own ideas of what is and isn’t allowed.
There’s almost no question that some lines were
crossed in the governor’s administration. The big question now is
whether the behavior was flagrant enough that the U.S. attorney decides to
act before the November election. Ten years ago, nobody would have batted
an eyelash at any of this stuff. But Patrick Fitzgerald wasn’t around
10 years ago.
Illinois Times has provided readers with independent journalism for almost 50 years, from news and politics to arts and culture.
Your support will help cover the costs of editorial content published each week. Without local news organizations, we would be less informed about the issues that affect our community..
Click here to show your support for community journalism.